What makes Mahanthappa’s work so intriguing, and fulfilling, is how deftly he weaves Eastern and Western traditions, without diluting either. He has been exploring this invigorating fusion for nearly 20 years. On his latest album, “Gamak” (released by the German record label ACT), Mahanthappa also mixes in elements of funk, hip-hop, prog-rock, Middle Eastern music and more.

He receives exemplary instrumental support from Bay Area guitarist Dave Fiuczynski, French bassist Francois Moutin and New York drummer Dan Weiss, who has studied at length with former Ravi Shankar tabla player Samir Chatterjee. (Fiuczynski, Moutin and Weiss will perform at Mahanthappa’s concert here.) Together, the four swing, rock and repeatedly ignite as they engage in propulsive musical exchanges, some at rapid-fire tempos, that groove with infectious intensity.

Epiphany in India

The name of Mahanthappa’s band, Gamak, is well chosen (it’s the Indian word for melodic ornamentation). Yet, while his interest in the music of his parents’ homeland dates back to his childhood, it wasn’t until he visited India at the age of 22 — while touring with a jazz ensemble from Berklee — that Mahanthappa experienced a major artistic epiphany.

That epiphany reached a head when he attended a dusk-to-dawn concert in Bangalore. The performers included Hindustani singer Parveen Sultana — "She's a true master of music," he noted — and some of the master instrumentalists from Shakti, the pioneering jazz-meets-Indian-classical-music band launched by English guitar great John McLaughlin in the early 1970s.

“It was my first trip to India as an adult, my first without my parents and also my first trip there in more than 10 years,” Mahanthappa recalled. “So it was a larger confrontation of identity and trying to understand who I am, and my hybrid nature of being Indian-American and what that means to me. And it happened while I was in my cultural homeland and having a bit of a struggle, where I wanted to deal with Indian music but didn’t know how to do that, and how to do it on my own terms, as a jazz saxophonist.

“I think a lot of people assumed I was an expert in Indian music, because of my name and the color of my skin. And there had been a lot of mediocre ‘East/West’ fusion projects that I knew didn’t feel right to me. So it was great to hear live music, on my own terms, within the experience of being in India as a fully formed human being.”

Mahanthappa's life-changing trip to India has profoundly impacted his music ever since.

"I made an album in 1995 and almost everything on there was inspired by that trip," he said. It's a very straight-ahead album on the surface, with distorted blues and R&B changes, but it was one of my first efforts ot thinking about tala-like beat cycles and raga-oriented things. It's a very early manifestation, and then it continued from there.

"Around that time, (acclaimed Indian-American pianist) Vijay (Iyer) and I met for the first time and we proceeded to pick each others (musical minds) for a number of years. We've known each other 17 years now. We'd been checking out very diffrent aspects of Indian music. Most of my albums at that point tended to be Hindustani and I was more melody-oriented and thinking of playing ragas. Whereas Vijay was thinking more about rhythm and what he could do with two hands (on the piano). So we were complimentary."